Letting Go 2007
Sam started High School yesterday….and far be it for me to say something trite like, it seems like only yesterday…but it does. And I can’t help but wonder, are we both ready for this? I know, I know its only high school; college will be where you will really have to let go.
Letting go? So I just wrote about helicopter parents last week. I didn’t raise the issue then, but of course I secretly wondered…am I a helicopter parent? Well Sam would probably answer that in the affirmative with that little eye roll and smirk that he started developing this summer whenever I would ask, “Who is going? Are {insert name} parents going to be home?”
We actually used to talk…as in conversation; two way, back and forth. Now he seems to be trying to perfect providing the least amount of information possible in the fewest words. This has caused me to try and perfect the art of asking every combination of questions possible regarding a certain event or issue so that the one thing that I didn’t ask is the one that really matters. The one that another parent asks the next day in the context of, “You didn’t know that they….”
OK, I have been through this once before with his older brother, but Sam is my baby. The dynamic is slightly different.
Last Friday we both attended what the invitation said was “Grade 9 Orientation For Students and Parents.” Yes, there more than a few helicopter parents in the room; but then again, this is a helicopter school.
We received several handouts. One was titled “Starting Upper School: Helping Your Teen Adjust.” I think it must have been written by Mrs Rayburn from Leave it to Beaver.
Some highlights:
“Don’t forget that your teen too, is about to enter or has already begun puberty.” Puberty? Oh, hadn’t noticed.
“AND IMPORTANTLY : Do not forget that despite their age, teenagers still need parental affection, love, guidance, and support.” Memo to parents, love your children.
Okay, so as Nordette Adams at Blogher said at the end of her post on helicopter parents,
“What’s going on here is simple: People worry too much. Sometimes you just need to have faith and let go.”
Well, I am not sure I am ready to let go. But I do know one thing, a very positive thing occurred this evening.
Sam handed me this note. A post it note. What’s the big deal? Well, today is Thursday. He doesn’t need the shoes he is referring to until Monday but he is letting me know now. With a note written on a post.
In the past, I would have heard about the shoes on Sunday night, after the stores had closed or on Monday morning on the way to school; even on a phone a few minutes after I dropped him off . And he wouldn’t have known whether he needed new shoes or whether his old shoes fit…and he wouldn’t have been able to find them anyway.
This was a big day.
Yay Sam…way to go!
Social Entrepreneurship for Seniors: Purpose Prize
A great deal is being written about the aging baby boomers, that attention grabbing, developmental stage defining, amorphous yet distinct, demographic group that I count myself as a member of…..I think sometimes that one of our most distinctive characteristics is our lack of acceptance of aging but perhaps that, along with the feeling of distinctiveness itself, is just part of the developmental stage process. So, the addition of aging to baby boomer, aging baby boomer, as in, I am an aging baby boomer, is a bit disconcerting.
There are several recent blog posts asnd articles specifically addressing the aging baby boomer paradox. David Wolfe at Ageless Marketing frequently writes great posts about aging and baby boomers in the context of marketing. His perspective is shaped by developmental stage theory and in his view the second half of life is very different than the first in regard to internal versus external focus. In our later years, we focus outward and seek to understand the meaning of life, specifically the meaning of our lifes.
James Hillman, a psychologist and the author of 20 amazing books, wrote one book, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life that says that the purpose pf aging is the fulfillment and confirmation of our character. His thesis is that even the ravages of old age have a purpose: changes in sleep patterns allow us to experience elements of nighttime that we missed when asleep or the decline in short term memory allows us the opportunity for longer term reflection. He writes, "Aging makes metaphors of biology." He speaks of life being cyclical and that if we want our lives not to stray too far from our character, we need to make tiny adjustments like a sailor with a hand on the tiller, constantly correcting course though never exactly on-course.
It is in the second half of life that we feel the pull to stay close to our families and to work toward the social good. The benefit to society was termed, "return on experience(ROE)" by Civic Ventures, a San Fransisco non-profit that develops outreach programs for baby boomers and seniors to serve the public good. They are launching a program in June called the "Purpose Prize" that will award $100,000 each to five social entrepreneurs who according to the Wall Street Journal are "individuals age 60 or older who are trying to improve their communities through their work." Applications will be taken at www.leadwithexperience.org beginning on Tuesday, December 6th.
Civic Ventures says according to the Wall Street Journal, that in addition to helping the five social entrepreneurs they also wish to highlight the results of a survey they conducted that indicated that three fifths of adults in their fifties said they wanted to use the next stage of their lives to serve their communities. Civic Ventures notes that the oldest of the baby boomers will turn sixty in January, the healthiest, best educated population of Americans to reach the stage that Civic Ventures calls "pioneers"…a stage of life between middle and later life, neither young nor old. Essentially, baby boomers will become senior boomers….as we turn sixty we will be, now let’s not choke when we say it, seniors.
The Senior Lawyers Project is another non-profit that uses over 60 talent for the prublic good. With a budget of $175,000 and three employees, they have sent 200 US attorneys to developing counties over the past four years.
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Marketing Person Not a Geek
Toby Bloomberg at Diva Marketing conveyed a discussion she had regarding Blog Tags with Stowe Boyd from Corante. Toby’s point was that as a marketing person not a geek, tagging was a challenge. Boyd’s point was that she should get over it and that not knowing how to do something was not "a badge of honor".
Well tagging is way up there on my list of things I know I need to understand but in spite of an ongoing search for a simple enough explanation, still don’t understand. Also on list, HTML. I too would say that I am a marketing person, not a geek. But, in my defense (and Toby’s also, should she chose to accept the defense) I don’t believe that my non-understanding of modern Geek is worn as a badge of honor. I wish I could just look at some of the this and just get it and get over it….I just don’t. It’s a brain thing.
Conversely, over at Creating Passionate Users a recent post with the title, You are a marketer, Deal with it directed engineers and product designers to "get over it"….no more it’s Geek to us badges regarding marketing. In another post, they direct the spotlight on all of us and ask, Who’s in charge you- or your brain? They then go on to say, "Everyone should know how their brain really works, because it–not you–is running the show!" Much of what they write about is about dealing with that. Ok, maybe my "it’s a brain thing" sounds a little lame when viewed in this light. Can I just whine a little and say there are just certain things that are really hard for me to understand?
OK then…so back to tagging and wouldn’t you know it but Rashmi Sinha wrote a cognitive analysis of tagging and explains it as a 2 stage process: The first stage is the "computation of similarity" between the concept and the"candidates" for related semantic concepts. The second stage is the decision regarding which category is the right one which involves various cognitive processes and much angst. However, Sinha’s theory of tagging is that the really great thing about tagging is that it eliminates step 2. You simply take your concept, subject, or object…and then do a kind of Freudian free association list of concepts, subjects or objects that come to mind, write them down and call them tags.
I get it…but I still don’t get de-licio-us.
Target Invades the New Yorker
Maybe the red and white beach ball on the cover of my August 22nd New Yorker should have been a clue. Since I missed that clue….flipping to the content page left no doubt as the familiar red target played ring toss on the Empire State Building. Further flipping revealed the truth: Target was the only advertiser in my
New Yorker. I quickly turned to Google for further investigation.
I must have missed the news! Slate has the James Michener version for any of you Targetophiles out there but the announcement was available from Stuart Elliot and the New York Times, Media Week, Yahoo News, and other usual media suspects. And of course people blogged about it here and there.Even Target Employees were up on it.
OK..now let me just say that I AM a Target shopper…no Seinfeld Tar-zhay pronunciation necessary. Target is fun. Wal-Mart is not. Enough said. And I know that Target now has NYC locations. When I lived in NYC pre-Target I missed Target. I am sure many New Yorkers are happily pushing their carts up and down the aisles at Target at this very moment. No doubt, Target should advertise to New Yorkers and New Yorker Magazine readers. No pun, Target should target.
But, I love reading the New Yorker. I look forward to it. I was just thinking the other day when a renewal notice came for Newsweek that I really didn’t read it any more….that the New Yorker was the only print publication that I still did read. So….all that said, I really found the Target advertising in the New Yorker intrusive. Intrusive. Not artistic, not compelling or interesting. Intrusive.
Back in my early days in brand marketing, someone at Ralston Purina said, if I may paraphrase by memory, that if you wanted a high recall score you could just put a cat through a meat grinder. This came to mind as I was deciding what to read first and kept getting intruded upon by red circles. Or, am I just being a grumpy aging Baby Boomer, again?
And What IS the Everyday Woman?
The New York Times reports the following today: "Madison Avenue is increasingly interested in using everyday women in advertising instead of just waifish supermodels." This new "insight" is attributed to Unilever’s Dove Brand which is of course reassuring since these are the folks that bring us Axe advertising, a topic I have posted about several times. It seems that everyone from Nike to Chicken of the Sea has adopted the everyday woman who is apparently older, wrinkled and has a big butt. Chicken of the Sea was last seen with Jessica Simpson so I am not sure if their new advertising is good news or bad news.
So….why this change you ask? Well, some say because women are the majority buyers of "these" products. Others say "aging baby boomers." Still another opinion was "reality television".
And I say? Puh-leeze! Am I lost in a recurring nightmare of "insights" from ad people? It is comforting to know that it has been a long time since I took home a paycheck from an ad agency. Its hard to decide what is sillier….the campaigns or our worst nightmare, advertisers with insights! As Ageless Marketing’s David Wolfe wrote, "Nike’s Just Do it Just Blew It." Indeed, Nike has "come a long way, baby" from "Just Do It" to "Big Butts"…just in the wrong direction, baby boomer.
Wonder Marketing asks the best question of Weiden & Kennedy in a conference room role play: "Who are you trying to reach with this ad?" I think the answer is obvious: Ourselves of course! We developed this campaign for ourselves because that is the only reality we get.
M&Ms and Books Supersize
Today’s New York Times reported two size increases …M&Ms and paperback books. Because as we Baby Boomers age we struggle with the small print size of paperback books, several publishers are issuing some books in a new Baby Boomer friendly print size. M&Ms are apparently now available in a supersize called Mega M&Ms. They are 55% larger and a Mars senior marketing manager is quoted as saying that M&Ms have historically been about sharing and that the larger size is "in tune with that."
Well, as a small print challenged Boomer I am all for the larger paperbacks…but as a Boomer who has been watching those M&Ms dive into the chocolate and promise to "melt in your mouth not in your hands" forever, I don’t recall ANYTHING about sharing. A quick trip to the M&M website did not produce any evidence of a "sharing" strategy. The NYT article challenged the sharing strategy more directly by saying that in fact M&Ms are the perfect food for stealth eaters…the package can be hidden while the size of the candy itself allows them to be eaten without anyone noticing. I guess especially easy to do if you are hiding from Baby Boomers without their reading glasses. Maybe the new supersized 55% larger Mega M&Ms are really are "all about" the new supersized 55% larger us….60% of Americans are overweight and 20% are obese.
And as far as sharing M&Ms…well as we all know, they DO melt in our hot little hands and we really like to take them from our own package or bowl, not someone else’s hands.
Kickball Lives!
An article in today’s WSJ on kickball caught my nostalgic Boomer’s eye… I started thinking about that red ball, recess, and grade school. 
I would never have imagined back then (way, way back then) that there would be such a thing as WAKA, the World Adult Kickball Association. Kickball, it seems is quite popular among "recent college graduates" who according to the WSJ "appreciate its combination of minimal physical exertion, ample game-time socializing and postgame drinking." 
Sounds like the perfect sport for the recently publicly labeled entitlement generation.
No less an authority than Dr. Mel Levine has proclaimed an epidemic of twentysomethings "who had too much success early in life
and who’ve become accustomed to instant gratification…many of the individuals we see are heavily
committed to something we call ‘fun.’" Must have been all those blue first place ribbons for "participation" that they have….now they are all expecting to graduate from college, put in a hard morning as CEO of General Motors, and play competitive kickball until Happy Hour.
The entitled have responded at Corante by blaming their elders…. for misinforming them. Is not-it one word or two?
Baby Boomers Re-invent Retirement
The Christian Science Monitor reports the beginning of a new trend in retirement locations for baby boomers: the fastest growing "active adult" communities are in the snow belt not the sun belt. Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. Developers are all over the Sun City without the sun concept.
The trend is fueled in part by the desire to stay closer to families as well as the trend toward remaining in the workforce longer than earlier retirees, albeit not always in the traditional sense of working part time. Boomers according to Marc Freedman of Civic Ventures and author of Prime Time: How Baby Boomers will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America, boomers look at retirement as "freedom to work" and not only are volunteering their time but also starting non-profit ventures, starting foundations and clinics.
One amazing boomer is Jill Fallon, author, lawyer and entrepreneur who is developing software targeted at Boomers to help organize life’s bu sines affairs as well as life’s legacy in an electronic system called ESOL (TM). She writes three blogs, Legacy Matters, Estate Legacy Vaults, and the Busines of Life which cover ESOL (TM) as well as many topics of interest from Boomer life, Boomer business to Boomer death and much in between. Shel Israel has a great interview with Jill Fallon on Naked Conversations from a few weeks ago.
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